What Can Church and Parents Do To Stop Our Young People From Leaving?

Mike Matthews, editor of Answers magazine, spoke with Al Mohler, president
of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, about one of the most pressing questions
in the church today: "With so many children leaving the church by their twenties,
what are we doing wrong, and what solutions can the church and parents implement?"

MIKE: Statistics indicate that six out of ten children who grew up in conservative
churches are now leaving when they reach their twenties. What seems to be the
problem?

The pattern of young people leaving the church is different than it was even
in some recent generations, where it was more temporary. It now appears in the
lives of millions of young people, raised in our churches, to be a rather permanent
alienation from the church and from the truth claims of Christianity.

We know the touch points. They're easy to understand: entry into high school
at about age 13-14; graduation from high school, 17-18; graduation from college,
at about age 22. Those are times when young people are making very big decisions.
And the reality is that many of them are simply opting out, which tells us that
they never really understood or were committed to what it would be to be a faithful
disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In terms of what we understand about the importance of worldview, their worldview
was evidently not shaped adequately by biblical truths such that they were able
to withstand the tide of the secular culture and the allure of the other worldviews
around them.

We're in a world of competing lifestyles, worldviews, and even expectations
and pictures of what the good life would be. The reality is that many of our
young people are simply following into a peer culture—and then disappearing into
a larger secular culture.

MIKE: You raise the issue of a secular culture. Does the church need to change
its strategy, recognizing that we're fighting a postmodern world?

You know, our apologetic challenge is more complicated than it has ever been
before. It is true that we live in a new age. We're trying to figure out what
to call it, and postmodern is probably as good as anything else. Postmodernism
as an ideological movement is especially important for our consideration of
these things because one of its primary tenets is the relativity of truth.

When you are talking about the gospel of Jesus Christ, in contrast, you're
talking about the Word of God. You're talking about the revelation of God to
us as God speaks to us in His Word. It's completely incompatible with a relativist
understanding of truth.

But we're not really in a postmodern age. We're just kind of in "postmodern
moods" because we still live in a world shaped by the Enlightenment, as well.
A lot of what we face, for instance in the battle over science and origins,
a lot of what we face in academic debates, and the new atheism, most of that
is really not postmodern.

It's really the same old arguments going all the way back to questions of how
we can know that something really happened. How can we know there really was
a Christ? How can we know these things? Those are old Enlightenment questions,
and they are still around.

So we are really going to have to be sophisticated enough to be able to fight
something like a two-front war. I know there are parents out there going, "How
am I going to do that?" Well, not alone. But you should at least be somewhat
familiar with what is going on. If you're sending your children into the schools,
you better have a pretty good idea of the worldview that they are going to be
receiving there.

MIKE: What is the church doing wrong in this "war"?

Well, I think we can easily diagnose several problems that desperately need
to be fixed.

Problem #1: Churches are doing too much for young people.

Churches in many ways have actually, I think, added to the problem by doing
too much for young people. The idea of the church is as a full-service entertainment
and activity center, where you take children away from their parents and you
just put them in a different peer culture. Now it's a church peer culture, and
you are very concerned to give them all the right entertainment and activities.
What happens when all of that gets old?

What happens when they grow out of that? What happens when you all of a sudden
discover they simply don't have the faith, the knowledge, the beliefs, the convictions,
and the commitments that you had hoped for?

I think one of the problems with too many churches is they have a "youth program."
Well, the youth need to be integrated into the totality of the church program.

Just a few years ago, I saw this at work, and it just reminded me of how absent
it is elsewhere. I was in a very large church pastored by a dear friend of mine.
As I was talking to him, there was a knock on the door; it was a 16-year-old
boy. He came into the pastor's office. He obviously knew him well, and he said,
"Excuse me but I knew you told me to come by this afternoon. I'm on my way to
do something else; this is the only chance I had."

It showed the importance of this pastor's investment in young people that his
secretary ushered him right into the office. They had a brief conversation.
That's when I discovered this 16-year-old boy was going to be leading the entire
congregation in prayer in a service and he was coming in to make sure that he
had everything together.

This is a church that takes teenage boys and brings them into the leadership
of the church, saying, "We want you to learn how to read the Scripture. We want
you to learn how to be a husband. We want you to learn how to be a teacher of
the Scripture. We want you to learn how to make decisions based upon biblical
truth. We want you to learn how to pray in front of people."

You know, the average 16-year-old kid has a hard time shaking your hand and
looking you in the eyes, much less getting in front of 4,000 people and saying,
"Let's pray."

Now that just impressed me in an incredible way. The expectation level is completely
different from what I see in most churches.

Problem #2: Churches teach a therapeutic, moralistic view of God.

A research team led by Christian Smith found that the majority of teenagers
and young twenty-somethings in our churches actually hold to a faith that he
identified as "moralistic, therapeutic deism."

Deism is the faith that there is a God but He's not too involved in
your everyday life. This is a God who created the world in some general sense
and is out there. A well-intentioned deity, but that's it.

The moralistic part is that most of these young people believe that
God does exist and He wants them to behave, but in a rather general sense. It's
moralistic.

It's also therapeutic. Their faith is that God wants them to be happy.
They simply imbibed from the educational philosophy, from the way many of their
parents have parented them, from the messages of the world, the advertisements
on television, and the music they listen to. The entire cosmos around them tends
to be communicating, "Your happiness is the great goal in life."

So we have a generation of young people who believe that there is a God, but
they don't have any particular god in mind. This is not necessarily any kind
of understanding of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the father of our
Lord Jesus Christ.

God is not merely the Creator who is uninvolved in creation. He is the Sovereign—in
control of every atom and molecule in the world. He is the judge who is not
moralistic; He is holy. He does want our happiness, but that happiness is nothing
like what the world describes as happiness. It's the joy and contentment from
being united with Christ through the gospel and coming to know the one true
and living God.

You know, when I was growing up, I was at church upwards of eight hours a week.
That meant every week. Nowadays with soccer games, little league practice, ballet,
and all the rest, kids are spending a very small amount of time actually even
in the church activities that they would count as keeping them highly active.
Many of those activities have very little theological, biblical, spiritual content.

So you reduce it down to what they get. What's the message they get? I had
one young person who told me, straight-faced, an 18-year-old from a fine evangelical
church: "What I learned is, that I should love Jesus and not to have sex until
I'm married."

Both of those things, by the way, are true. But they are not isolated. If that's
all he got, that's all he heard, it just might be, in some cases, not because
he wasn't listening.

MIKE: What steps can the church take to do better?

Solution #1: The church needs to focus on expository preaching and teach how
to think biblically.

The pulpit has to take responsibility. In far too many churches there is just
no expository preaching. There isn't the robust biblical preaching that sets
forth the Word of God and then explains how the people of God are going to have
to think differently and live differently in order to be faithful to that Word.
So it's really a multi-level thing.

We also need help even outside the local congregation, just in order to stay
attuned to a conversation that isn't just about where we live. That's why we
need good organizations doing research; we need think tanks on behalf of the
Christian faith. We need book publishers publishing really quality material
and authors writing them. We need organizations like Answers in Genesis and
many others.

I believe this includes the seminary where I serve, in order to help turn out
people, turn out material, and turn out programming and information to help
Christians know how to process these things, think about these things, and yes,
teach their children.

Solution #2: The church needs to show the seriousness of church, including
personal accountability.

The local church must be a robust gospel people. It must be a warm fellowship
of believers. It must be a fellowship of believers who are really living out
holiness and faithfulness to Christ, and being mutually accountable for that.

Where you have no church discipline, where you have no honesty about what sin
is and how it operates in our lives and how it is to confronted, then our kids
are going to get the message: "You talk a lot about sin, but it's really not
all that important to you." Or they will think the gospel is simply about moralism.
They'll think that all God expects of them is that they behave with XYZ and
that they don't break these rules, when the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ
is about salvation from sin and we are already condemned as sinners, as we're
told in John 3.

Solution #3: The church needs to give answers about current issues.

We're not giving our kids adequate information on some very crucial issues.
Consider the questions that the average teenager is facing, "Why aren't you
having sex with your girlfriend?" "Why don't you believe in evolution?" "Why
don't you accept this worldview?" "Why won't you go in this direction or accept
this lifestyle?"

If we aren't giving them intellectual material, intellectual knowledge, fiber,
and confidence, we shouldn't be surprised they're going to go with the flow
because that is the way the tides work. It picks up the stuff, and they become
the flotsam and jetsam of the cultural movement. I don't want to lose my children
that way. We can't afford to lose our children that way.

Solution #4: The church needs to explain how the gospel is unfolding through
real history.

There is another big failure. I really want folks to understand this because
this works from cradle to grave. We are missing in our churches the understanding
that the gospel is a story.

We are speaking of propositional truth as if oftentimes it's an outline to
put up on an overhead projector. The Christian faith, the Christian truth claim,
the gospel, is first of all a master narrative about life, about God's purpose
to bring glory to Himself. It has four major movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption,
Consummation.

It starts with Creation. God for His glory created this world,
creating human beings as the only creature in this universe who is made in His
image, able to know Him consciously. If we really do bring our children into
this story, the creation-evolution debate is not just some kind of intellectual
argument. It's a way of understanding that if you get the story wrong from the
beginning, you are never going to get to the right place. The only way to understand
the great story of the gospel is to begin with the fact that God is the Creator
and He is the Lord of all.

But you can't stop there. The second of the four great movements is the Fall
and sin. Eventually we're going to have to explain to them how sin explains
everything that goes on in the world, from tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes
and cancer to mosquitoes and just about everything else they experience as evil.
We're going to have to explain how the Fall explains why things aren't as they
should be.

The third great chapter or movement is Redemption. At the
end of the second chapter we've got to say, "There is no way out of this. We
can't solve the problem." We, through our sin, brought this catastrophe onto
the cosmos and onto our own lives. With sin came death, and that explains the
totality of the problem. We can't do anything about it, but God did. While we
were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Redemption is that essential third part
of the story that explains why we have hope and why our identity is in Christ.
It explains why the only identity worth having is in Christ.

The fourth chapter is Consummation, or completion, or new
creation. That is God accomplishing His purposes, first of all for His redeemed
people, the church. God accomplishes His purposes in a new heaven and a new
earth, a new creation, a new Jerusalem. God brings everything in history to
its proper end—God judging and God making whole. Creation is returned to the
situation with Adam and Eve in the Garden not only prior to sin, but now glorified
to be greater than ever before because we now know God not only as Creator but
also as Redeemer.

If we don't anchor our children in that story . . . if they think that Christianity
is merely a bunch of stuff to believe . . . if they don't find their identity
in that, in which they say, "Yes, that's my story; this is where I am; this
is where history is headed; this is where I am going in faithfulness to Christ,"
then they are going to fall away.

You know, they can fall away and still hold in their minds to a whole lot of
Christian truth. They just don't connect the dots. They never see the big picture.
And they are easy prey for all the competing worldviews and ideologies around
us.

MIKE: In one sense, there is nothing new under the sun. Get back to the Scriptures,
and walk with God in faith . . .

Yeah, and have your eyes wide open to the questions that the world is presenting
to us. That's why I do my radio show the way I do it. That's why you guys [Answers
in Genesis] exist. Because we are answering questions and trying faithfully
to help others give the right answers to questions that are natural, that are
inevitable in this world.

If you get the creation issue wrong, you get everything after that wrong. If
we treat the gospel as anything less than propositional truth, we'll lose the
gospel. It's established in the historic act of God in Christ—in the death,
burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

But it's more than propositions, because we don't just know about Christ, we
come to know Christ. That makes all the difference in the world.

MIKE: Is there a misunderstanding or a short-sightedness about the mission
of the church?

In creation God gave us the gift of marriage and family. In the Christian home
the parents have that first responsibility. The parents are the first teachers,
the first nurses, the first physicians. They are the first coaches. They are
the first judges. They are the first police force. They must invest themselves
as first teachers in grounding children in the biblical truths. You can't just
franchise that out to the church.

But parents also, on the other hand, are not fully equipped to do that alone.
We need each other in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's why the
only shape of the church in the New Testament is a church shape. It's not autonomous
Christians living on islands of faithful Christianity. It's Christians banded
together in the body of Christ, living under mutual accountability to the lordship
of Christ and to the authority of God's Word, exhorting one another. You look
at a passage like Colossians 3, exhorting one another to good things.

We should be doing a reality check as Christian parents in the church. How
are we doing? How are you doing with your kids? What have you learned?

Here is my struggle. We should be exhorting each other, helping each other,
equipping each other in this task. Christian young people should be drawn into
the church, not in a way that isolates them with other young people.

The church is the intergenerational people of God. The church is the only place
on the planet where you should have 6-year-olds, 16-year-olds, and 60-year-olds
singing the same songs, which means they are each going to have to give a little
and learn a little in order to do that together. But that is what the church
is to be.

MIKE: What are parents doing wrong?

Problem #1: Parents are failing to convey the gospel and ground them in the
Scriptures.

We've got to start treating young people as a mission field, not just assuming
that mere nurture would lead them into Christian discipleship and into Christian
faith. There is a deficit of the gospel in far too many churches and in the
attentiveness of far too many parents.

Parents need to take a big responsibility here. The one thing we know from
the entirety of the Scripture—just take one passage like Deuteronomy 6—is
that parents have the non-negotiable responsibility to train, educate, nurture
their own children into the faith, to confront them with biblical truth, to
ground them in the Scriptures.

Problem #2: Parents have bought into a secular understanding of parenthood.

We also have on the part of many Christian parents a buy-in to a new secular
understanding of parenthood. Many Christian parents would be offended to hear
that because they'd say, "Look, we're Christians, we have boundaries and rules
and expectations—we have our children at church to get the right influences.
We try to keep the wrong influences out."

We are letting our children make big decisions far too early. So, when you
have a 14-year-old, 15-, 16-, 17-year-old, making decisions about whether he
or she is going to participate in church activities, be at church . . . that's
a child who is making decisions that should be made for her, should be made
for him.

The reality is that the peer culture of adolescence is now more important in
the lives of many children than their parents themselves. That's something that
parents need to be certain they are not just surrendering to.

MIKE: What steps can parents take to do better?

You know, if you are a general and you're responsible to lead an army, one
of the most important things you do is brief your troops. You don't just send
them out. You give them the information that they need. You ground them in the
mission. You invigorate them in the task. You inspire them to courage, heroism,
and bravery. A good general throughout history knows exactly how to do that.
Unfortunately, we're sending our kids out into the world with too little information,
too little grounding, too little inspiration, too little self-identification
as the faithful of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Parents need to teach all the time, in everyday life.

I think one of the things parents need to do is to understand that this is
not something that you can do once a day, once a week, and say that's done.
That's why I go back to Deuteronomy 6. Deuteronomy 6 talks about parents teaching
in their going out and in their coming in. It's in the sitting down and in the
standing up. That means in everyday events of life.

One of the most important things we can do is make certain that we are spending
time with our children. As we are spending time with our children, it is a constant
teaching opportunity. I don't mean a piece of chalk and a blackboard. I mean
the kind of opportunity that comes from having seen something together and saying,
"All right how do we figure that out? What does that mean?"

Having seen a movie or television show with a child, especially a teenager,
say, "All right, what was going on there? What were the worldviews represented
there? How are we going to respond to that?"

Read together. I think one of the most important things that parents can do,
is to read, especially with teenage children. Read some of the same things.
And as children get older, let them choose some of the things to read. Read
it together, and then talk about it together. Then come back and say, "All right,
we need to talk about what's going on here."

Watch the news together. Talk about the news together.

And yes, talk about the Scriptures and teach the Scriptures. A family devotional
time is very important, but it is in its formal sense a fairly recent development
in the history of the church, especially in the Puritan movement. There is much
to be admired and much to be gained there.

Another thing you can do is, when you come home from church on Sunday, have
a conversation. Reinforce that Scripture lesson. Talk about what it means and
how it is going to translate into your lives, the lives of your children, and
the lives of your family.

MIKE: What subjects must be taught and at what age to better equip kids for
what they are going to face, with their friends thinking that life is all about
having fun and that truth is relative?

I think one of the things we must understand as parents is that children really
do move through successive stages of learning and intellectual development,
and maturity. So it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to put the encyclopedia
Britannica in the crib. That just doesn't work.

How should parents teach younger people?

When children are very young, we need to make certain at that very earliest
stage of intellectual development that they are surrounded by the things of
God, that they are hearing Scripture with their ears, that they are seeing in
their parents and receiving in the home that constant reinforcement of the fact
that we do not exist for ourselves. We received you as a gift from God, and
we're going to raise you in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. You just
communicate that in an age-appropriate way.

You also discipline them. You explain to them you're doing this because you're
going to train them to know the difference between right and wrong and do the
right and avoid the wrong.

How should parents teach school-age children?

The next stage of life, about school age, when they really are putting on the
backpacks and going off to school, that's when they start asking some different
questions.

At that stage parents need to be really, really constant in conversation; really,
really constant in terms of saying, "You need to read this. I'm going to read
what you're reading, and we're going to be talking about this."

At that stage children are not suspicious. They are not critical thinkers,
and they're not trying to figure out whether they really exist or not. They're
not postmodernists; they're not moral relativists. They are just trying to figure
out how am I going to get through this stage of life, and will I make the little
league team and all that.

How can parents help adolescents think through the big questions of life?

Adolescence is the crucial point. For the first time, they are not only thinking,
they can think about themselves thinking. For the first time, they can imagine
themselves in other contexts, being raised by other families, living other lives,
having to follow other rules.

For the first time they're beginning to think the big questions of life. When
the lights go out at night, they're trying to figure out, "Do I really know
the meaning of life? Do I really know who I am?"

At that stage, parents need to both back off and get close. That may sound
confusing. But to back off is this. Don't be afraid if your kid is asking questions.
Far too many Christian parents are scared to death of their teenage children
when on the way home from school, the kid says, "How do we really know that
Christianity is true?"

Be very, very careful to make sure your kids know you are the safe person to
ask. Even when panic begins to set in the back of your mind, don't let it show
on your face. Say, "That's a good question. We need to think about that. We
need to go find the answers together."

When someone comes up, when they see a same-sex couple holding hands, and say,
"What does that mean?" you're going to have to talk about that. You can't just
say at that stage of life, "That's wrong." You're going to have to explain a
much larger picture that gets back to the basic truths of the Christian faith.
Understand that your children are asking those questions on the inside, if they
are not asking them where you can hear them on the outside.

Create safe places, safe times when your kids can ask those questions. I used
to pester my parents with questions late at night. My parents were kind enough
and loving enough that they let me ask questions when I think they would have
rather gone to bed.

My son tends to have the best conversations in a moving vehicle. That's true
for an awful lot of boys, by the way. You get in the car, you can talk. Take
the kid fishing. Take her to the museum. Do whatever you have to do. Get into
a situation where they feel free to ask these kinds of questions.

Another issue that really becomes very, very important with all of these stages
of life is: don't be afraid to say, "I know there is a good answers for that.
I'm not sure right now I'm prepared to give the right answer for that. So we're
going to go find it together."

MIKE: Do you have anything else to add?

I want to speak to parents as a parent. I want to share some good news, and
that is you are absolutely incompetent. That is the best word I can give you.

You know it, and I know it. You look in the mirror, you look in the crib, you
look at your child sitting there, and you go, I am not equipped for this. And
that is true.

We are incompetent, but we know from a Christian worldview that we're incompetent
to do everything important. The preacher is incompetent to preach. The teacher
is incompetent to teach. It is Christ who makes us competent. Our competency
is from the Lord.

The Lord does not send parents out to fail. He does not send Christian parents
with this task and then say, "You are on your own." We have the indwelling Christ,
we have the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we have the Word of God, we have the
fellowship of believers in the church, and by the grace and mercy of God, we
actually find a competency to do what in ourselves alone we'd never be able
to do.

The most important of all things we are called to be is the only couple before
God who hold the responsibility to bring these children to the very gates of
the kingdom. We need to give them everything we can possibly give them to bring
them there. And we trust that Christ, and Christ alone, can keep them there.